qwerty

mercredi, juin 22, 2005

you'll never be good enough for my son, so hands off

I mentioned to a great friend of mine that as the mother of three boys I was bound to experience one or more of the following mother's nightmares:a) son in a bandb) son who plays drums in a bandc) son who rides a motorbike.

My friend agreed with me, before pointing out that undoubtedly I would experience all three - and all three would be Raphael.

When I picked R up from school this morning, he was carrying a very large hand-drawn paper rabbit. I complimented him on it, but he told me he hadn't done it. 'Oh, who did do it?' I asked. 'Marie', he said. 'Good friend of yours is she?' I asked. 'No, not particularly,' he said. Just at that moment Marie walked past with her mother. 'Il est joli, ton lapin', I said to her (sucking up to her son's girlfriend already, pathetic). 'Moi, j'appelle Raphael mon petit lapin, ou des fois mon petit ours', she told me.

My little rabbit? I was a bit surprised at that. She likes you, doesn't she, Marie, I said to Raphael. 'Yup, she says I'm the cutest one in the whole class,' he said. I never knew what chuckling really was until I heard Raphael laugh. He knows.

dimanche, juin 19, 2005

Thunderbirds are go

We got VIP passes (from a friend who's an engineer for a French defence company, God the company we keep) to go to the PAris Air Show yesterday, at Le Bourget. I was quite excited until I realised the whole air show is just a front for arms dealing. Or put another way when I realised that the difference between aeronautics and 'defence' is difficult to determine. The Israelis had a big presence there of course. We went into the Israeli stand, that stood 3 times the size of most of the other national stands, excluding the Russians, of course. We were mostly on the lookout for pins for the children, but it was hot so we sat down in front of a large screen, whereupon we were treated to an extraordinary simulation of an attack on the Occupied Territories using the kind of state of the art weaponry that I guess the Israelis were trying to flog. A computerised female, clearly modelled on Lady Penelope, was coordinating the attack. For some reason the children thought this wasn't very interesting (I guess after Star Wars but before the dawning of a political consciousness it might well have seemed pretty tame) and were considerably more thrilled to get a glimpse of the Airbus 380, which looked to me like every other big passenger jet but anyway, what do I know. The air acrobats (is there a better name for that in English?) were amazing.

Unfortunately our VIP passes didn't stretch to corporate entertaining so we were forced to smuggle in cheese baguettes onto the terrace and indulge in the free water and coffee on offer. When we got back to the car the temperature reading was 42.